


In the places where things have broken down

by Arokel



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Forgiveness, M/M, really it's just very... soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 03:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18357476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/Arokel
Summary: Quentin begins to repair things.





	In the places where things have broken down

“Repair of small objects?” Eliot says archly, when Quentin reaches that part of the story. “No, it’s great, Q, a very – long, and storied discipline. The Binder, the Repairer of Small Objects –“

“It got you back, didn’t it?” Quentin mutters, defensive. He’s felt… on his guard, ever since Eliot returned and said only ‘ _thank you_ ’ to each of them in turn, before fucking off to, of all places, Indiana. Quentin was so prepared; he spent so long steeling himself for… _whatever_ big revelatory reunion they might have, and then they… didn’t. Eliot only said ‘thank you,’ in a voice now almost less familiar than the monster’s, and then he was gone.

And he’s back now, sitting on Quentin’s bed like none of it ever happened, letting Quentin regale him with his part in the whole fucked-up ordeal, but that isn’t right either. He sat down with everyone else, one by one, and let them share the sacrifices they made, the wrongs they committed to get him back. Quentin almost thought he’d be skipped, that Eliot wouldn’t want to know, and that would be the end of it. Then he would know, not just suspect, that peaches and plums had been a convenient shorthand, nothing more.

This is almost worse. Because deep down, Quentin knows why Eliot saved him for last, and it isn’t anything special about Quentin. Eliot has been practicing, allowing every subsequent person to add another lifetime of guilt to his internal tally – beginning with Penny, who he barely knows, then Kady, and Julia, and Josh, and Margo, and Fen – all leading up to the last, the hardest, Quentin.

Quentin knows this. It’s easy to see, if you know Eliot like Quentin does, like Quentin _has._ This is the Eliot who puts others before himself, who would rather take their pain and make it his own, because, all bravado stripped away by exhaustion and horror, he believes he deserves it. Eliot has steeled himself just as Quentin did, gathered the tattered pieces of his personality while Fen cried into his chest, and now, only now, will he face Quentin.

“Thank you,” Eliot says again, an apology. He’s said little else, to any of them, and Quentin worries he never will.

“It was incredibly selfish and honestly I should probably be – reprimanded, or, or something,” Quentin says, because ‘you’re welcome’ doesn’t feel right, hasn’t, since the first ‘no problem’ died unspoken on his tongue with the slam of Kady’s apartment door.

Eliot says nothing. Then, so reminiscent of the monster in its abruptness, he changes the subject. “I was planting things.”

“Good… for you?”

Quentin hates himself for saying it, for pitching his voice the way he did when the monster wanted approval for some incomprehensibly awful act. He hates that Eliot isn’t _Eliot_ anymore, that he is as changed by this as Quentin is.

“Not in Indiana, god no,” Eliot continues, as if Quentin asked. “I thought about it, but Indiana has a population of like, thirty-five people, total, and I ran into my overcompensation of a middle school girlfriend at the bus station.”

“I’m not sure that’s true –“

“So I went to Vermont.”

“You went to Vermont?” Quentin repeats, blankly. He’s out of practice, can’t follow Eliot’s conversational leaps like he used to. He’s stuck with fragments and no through-line to guide him, unlike the days when Eliot could say the word ‘sunrise’ and an entire tiled image would reveal itself to Quentin with no explanation needed.

“It has –“ Eliot makes a gesture like smoothing down a blanket, or a pile of dirt. “Big trees.”

“Big trees.”

“Small cabins,” Eliot says, and Quentin gets it now.

Eliot makes the gesture again, running his hands over his knees like he’s forgotten there’s nothing covering them. It’s an unconscious motion, gentle, left over, Quentin thinks, from tucking Teddy in on their bed by the mosaic, keeping out the chill of the Fillorian night air. He pulls the blanket from the foot of the bed towards them.

“Is that – “ Eliot says.

Quentin holds it to his chest for a moment, protective, until he remembers that those gentle hands no longer destroy everything they touch.

It’s a heavy, faded quilt, purchased at a Fillorian flea market because Quentin was feeling sad and sentimental and the mosaic-tile pattern reminded him of Eliot, rescued from the Cottage before it could become kindling in Poppy's inevitable egg-induced inferno. The monster tore it apart, one night, stitch by stitch, and Quentin woke up cold, covered in colorful squares, Eliot’s unworldly stare the first thing he saw.

Eliot runs his fingers over the ragged edges of the quilt. It’s difficult to distinguish his voice from the monster’s, with his head bowed and his words soft and simple. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Quentin says, because it doesn’t, not really, because Eliot is sitting by his side, not touching, not with his head on Quentin’s shoulder like the monster would have done, and eventually Quentin will stop making these comparisons and find the strength to stitch it back together.

“Don’t be a martyr, of course it matters,” Eliot says, sharp, and then winces, the words echoing through layers of time and memory. “Did I do this?”

“He did.”

“No, Q. Did _I_ do this? Did I break… this?”

Eliot’s fingers trace the perforated lines of ripped stitches, and Quentin follows their meandering pattern – Eliot’s favorite, an abstract creation he claimed was Quentin’s face. It hung on the wall of the cabin until portraits of Teddy and the grandkids crowded it out, relegating it to a box of keepsakes Quentin once half-heartedly attempted to track down and instead found this quilt.

Quentin tries for a smile. It’s hard, after so many months of faking them, and he can see by Eliot’s face that he hasn’t got it right. “Repair of small objects, remember?”

“This isn’t small.”

Quentin hesitates. _This…_ isn’t what he wanted. It isn’t the reunion he hoped he’d get, nor the confession. But it is both, in its way. It is Eliot taking one tiny step closer to him, from Indiana to Vermont to this bed to this quilt to _this._

“I’ll do it square by square, then. Tried and true.”

“I’m not… good, at forgiving myself,” Eliot says. “My brain doesn’t work that way.”

Quentin waits. This is _definitely_ not the confession he wanted. But these words sound like Eliot, and that has to be worth something. That has to be worth the pain of hearing them.

“I broke us, Q. And you can’t fix that. You can’t – put us back to what we were, before I – “

Quentin pulls Eliot’s fretful fingers away from the colorless quilt, holds them in his own. “Did you mean it? Because it’s okay, if you didn’t. It did what it was meant to. It gave us the hope to keep going, to keep trying to save you.”

Eliot’s fingers jerk, but Quentin holds them tight, won’t let him pull away. The monster always had restless hands, ever-moving, twitchy, breaking things as carelessly as he snapped necks and ripped apart gods. Quentin holds those long fingers still and breathes in. “I’m not good at forgiving myself, either, so. I get it. I get that you think no one else will. But if you meant it, even a little – “

Eliot laughs, a broken sound, and he’s right, Quentin can’t fix it. “Q. You can’t seriously want – after everything you gave up for me, all the shit I put you through – “

“You sacrifice for the people you love,” Quentin says. “You told me I said that.”

“That wasn’t you.”

Quentin hears it now, the desperation, the terror he hadn’t heard for what it was, back before he knew what it was like to _truly_ lose Eliot, before he knew how much one person could regret not saying something. “But this is. And I’m gong to keep doing it, Eliot, because I was ready to fuck over the entire world for you after you broke my heart, so if you _meant_ it, then I don’t care what you did, I don’t care how much you fucked up, I will do whatever it takes to fix us.”

Eliot smiles, a small, rueful smile, and turns his hands to intertwine his fingers with Quentin’s. “I tried to plant peaches,” he says, “but I think they grow better with the opium.” His thumb strokes over the back of Quentin’s hand, a welcome restlessness, a reminder of how things used to be, before Eliot’s touch was something to shy away from.

“Vermont is too cold for peaches.”

“I know that _now_.” Eliot’s thumb on Quentin’s pulse feels like another quilt settling over his shoulders, another lifetime, surrounded by peach trees that he and Eliot planted together. “What pattern will you pick, when you fix it?”

“I was hoping we could solve it together,” Quentin says. Solve, not fix, because a puzzle isn’t broken just because it’s in pieces. They can put themselves back together. “But I thought I could start in the middle.”

“What color?”

“Gold.”

“Well, Coldwater,” Eliot says, and it’s not _Q_ , but Quentin doesn’t think the monster even knew his last name, Eliot’s teasing, lilting pronunciation of it relegated to Quentin’s memories, “do your thing.”

It isn’t the reunion he wanted. Eliot isn’t the person he was when he first gave Quentin the hope of one. But neither is Quentin, and neither of them are the people they were when they slept beneath patchwork quilts and the Fillorian stars. That isn’t them.

But they worked, and they can work again. Broken things, improbably but perhaps importantly, are Quentin’s specialty. He lifts Eliot’s hand to his mouth, pressing a kiss to each knuckle like a promise.

“Together. We do it together.”

Piece by piece, square by square, they will solve this.


End file.
